The Berkeley International begins on January 2 and round one pairings are already up. IM David Pruess gives more info about the event, the participants and
special pay-per-view coverage.

Starting with two three-hour broadcasts on January second,
the entire 10-round 4th Berkeley International Chess Tournament
will have live streaming video coverage. This tournament features an all-star field (more on that below), and the broadcasts themselves
should be very exciting (see more details below). Most likely, few people will be free to
watch every single show live, so all broadcasts will also be saved and
available to those buying the coverage package to be viewed (and
re-viewed) later at their convenience.

With over 20 foreigners and 10 Grandmasters, the Berkeley
International is one of the best opportunities in the U.S. for aspiring
players to work towards International Master or International
Grandmaster Titles. We will see players like Shankland, Milman,
Ravichandran, Collins, Naroditsky, Liou, Troff, and Gurevich face off
against strong GMs including:

GM Loek van Wely: won the Dutch Championship 6 years in a row,
and is a former member of the world top 10. Recently he has started
competing in some of the U.S.'s monster swisses, winning for example the
2010 Chicago Open.

GM Timur Gareev: became a Grandmaster at age 16, and has tied
for first in the Uzbek national championship. Since becoming a student
at University of Texas Brownsville, he has a number of smashing American
successes to his name, like the 2009 and 2010 Copperstate
Internationals and the 2010 National Open. An unfettered and imaginative
player, Timur is a definite candidate for brilliancy prizes as well as
tournament victories.

GM Robert Hess: Hess has fulfilled essentially every
accomplishment a young player in this country could hope to achieve and
much more, in particular, his completely stunning tie for second place
in the 2009 US Championship. A player who tends to be very difficult for
first timers to face off against, with the majority of his GM
competitors here being of non-US descent, his mysteriousness could end
up paying dividends against this tough field.

Greg Shahade is an international master, and the most
innovative chess organizer in the United States over the past decade,
founding the New York Masters tournaments, the US Chess League, and the
US Chess School.

For each round, the live broadcast will start 1:15 into the round,
and go for at least three hours. This is over 30 hours of exciting chess
coverage, with celebrity hosts, and chess stars stopping in to give you
their candid thoughts in the heat of battle, and answer your questions.
For a package price of 40$, this is about 1$ per hour! To purchase the
full coverage package, transfer by paypal to the tournament organizer,
Arun Sharma. (use the address asharmaATmathDOTberkeleyDOTedu).

The first round will be shown at www.chess.com/tv for FREE for ANYONE. To watch you do not need to purchase the package, or have a premium chess.com membership. Just go to the url and enjoy. Then pick up your computer, dial www.paypal.com,
and buy the package to watch the rest of the show! Hurry, as the number
of viewers for the broadcasts of rounds 2-10 is strictly limited.